Focus Is On Indie Cred -- With A Twist

Rule-breaking Studio Wins Big At Box Office, Oscars.

November 17, 2004|By Lorenza Munoz Los Angeles Times

In Hollywood there is no shortage of strange bedfellows. But could it be that the same people who brought you The Pianist and Lost in Translation are behind a B-level horror movie about a homicidal redheaded doll?

Indeed, as of Friday, Seed of Chucky has been playing in a theater near you, courtesy of Rogue Pictures, the genre label Focus Features launched earlier this year. Just as Miramax has Dimension, Focus -- a unit of Vivendi Universal -- now has its own low-budget, high-box-office popcorn movies to compensate for riskier, lower-grossing art-house fare.

To Focus co-president James Schamus, Seed of Chucky, the fifth installment of the horror comedy that began with Child's Play, is not just any horror flick.

"The `Seed' has some gender-identification issues," said Schamus, who is also a film-theory professor at Columbia University. "The `Seed' is a countercultural voice and offers a smart critique of dominant mores."

Schamus and co-president David Linde are in many ways out of place in Hollywood. In fact, they are not in Hollywood. Based in New York, they have a nerdy, even intellectual reputation in an industry known for its flamboyant characters.

"People are always surprised when they don't find us getting pedicures or debating French film theory," Schamus said. But he insists they are salesmen like everyone else in the business.

"You have to have a taste for salesmanship," he said. "You have to convince people that they should put their money down to see this film."

Now that they are branching out with more releases and a genre label, some in the industry wonder how long they can sustain their batting average.

Only three years into Focus' existence, the company has received 17 Oscar nominations and four wins, including best actor for Adrien Brody in The Pianist and original screenplay for Sofia Coppola for Lost in Translation.

These sophisticated crowd-pleasers also reaped strong revenues, both grossing $120 million worldwide. Focus' movies have grossed an average of more than $18 million -- extraordinary for art-house fare. This spring, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind brought in more than $53 million worldwide.

Their latest films, Vanity Fair, Shaun of the Dead and The Motorcycle Diaries, have performed solidly at the box office and received good reviews.

So far, they have had two domestic duds: Sylvia with Gwyneth Paltrow, which received lukewarm reviews and grossed $1 million; and the Heath Ledger/Orlando Bloom drama Ned Kelly, a movie Focus did not produce but distributed domestically for a fee. That film grossed less than $90,000 in the United States and a little more than $6 million internationally.

The company recently finished production on its most expensive feature yet, the intercontinental spy thriller The Constant Gardener, directed by Brazilian Fernando Meirelles (City of God) and shot in London, Kenya, Sudan, Berlin and Winnipeg, Manitoba. The movie, starring Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz, cost more than $30 million.

Next year also will see the release of a new movie by Ang Lee, Schamus' longtime collaborator. Brokeback Mountain, a romantic drama based on a story by Annie Proulx, stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Ledger as intimate friends working the Wyoming range.

Under Rogue Pictures, they will have Assault on Precinct 13, a remake of the John Carpenter action film due out Jan. 21, and Unleashed, the Jet Li-Morgan Freeman gangster movie scheduled for April 8.

While Focus' growth is a sign of success, some point to Miramax as a cautionary example of a studio that grew beyond its means, going from producing $15 million films to ones with budgets of more than $80 million. Linde is aware of the pitfalls and says he's determined to stick to the niche he's carving out with more moderately budgeted films.

Focus is one of about six specialized studios distributing and producing "independent" films. But it is unique in its reliance on the international market for financing and product. The company retains worldwide distribution rights to more than 75 percent of the films it releases in North America. It also acquires titles separately for the overseas market, raking in big gains there.

The executives' personal style also is unusual. If Harvey and Bob Weinstein are known as the blustering street vendors of the independent world, Schamus and Linde are generally described as gentlemanly by competitors, fair by buyers and people you "want to do business with" by producers.

Often, Schamus, Linde and their staffs can be found debating movies like film students. Schamus was nurtured on classic foreign films. As he grew up in the Los Angeles area, film was his ticket to see the world. Last year, he earned his doctorate in English from the University of California, Berkeley.